The lecture was attended by 30 first-year students, with relevantly little technical and administrative knowldege of Open Data. So, in the first 45 minutes we try to solve some "mysteries" of open data though visiting several open data sites and knowledge sources, while discussing on the various organisational and technical perspectives.

A panoramic view of the class at TU Delft.

This part of the lecture was supported by a couple of social media and cloud resources made on site:

- A twitter hashtag (#opendatadelft) where we could post questions, links and pictures.
- A google doc for listing online questions and answers on open data issues
A little more than 1/3 of the class participated on-line, some creating twitter accounts on the fly.

The second part of the lectured focused on new challenges for open data systems, around metadata management, demand and supply of open data, scientific research on open data and more.
You may see the slides at: http://www.slideshare.net/charalabidis/on-open-data

Monday, September 17, 2012

The
eleventh conference on Electronic
Government (eGOV 2012) sponsored by IFIP was held in beautiful
Kristiansand, Norway on the first week of September 2012.The conference provided a highly interactive
and professional forum for exchanging research concepts, progress and results. As in the past, IFIP EGOV featured refereed
paper presentations, invited keynote presentations, high‐level discussion
panels, workshops and a PhD Colloquium.

Kristiansand
is really a very nice, for some too quiet, small city in a very green and blue
environment (ideal for a Greek, if it was warmer at winter). But so “cosy” and so close to sailing at open
sea …

The
first day started with listening to the keynote speech of Jon Hovland, PhD,
Advisor to the e-Governance unit, Ministry of Administration, Reform and Church
Affairs, Norway. Jon gave a broad and
inspiring view of the next plans and actions for an open, collaborative administration
in Norway, and, administering the …

Anneke Zuiderwijk, Delft University of Technology: “Benefits and
impediments of challenges for the use of open government data”.

Yannis Charalabidis, University of AEGEAN: “The ENGAGE platform for open
data: Characteristics and Challenges”. After the ENGAGE platform presentation participants
were asked to provide answers to questions on the functionality and the
usability of the ENGAGE tools.

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology: “Open data and the need
for transforming government”, on the type of transformations that are needed
in governmental organizations to make the provision of open government data successful.

Analytical questionnaires on open data requirements and a lot of comments
and suggestions were collected from the workshop participants.

View of the participants at the Kristiansand Castle

The evening reception at the Castle, hosted by the Mayor and the Universiy of Agder, was attended by many participants.

With the awards comittee at the celebration

Some
good news we had during the dinner on the second day, that was held in the
magnificent and nicely placed Kristiansand music/arts theater: Our paper “Issues and guiding principles for opening governmental judicial research data”, by Anneke Zuiderwijk , Marijn Janssen, Ronald Meijer, Sunil Choenni, Yannis Charalabidis and Keith Jeffery won the Best Paper Award, for the Category “most promising practical concept”

The Best 2012 Paper Award

The next day, our paper on the NOMAD eGovernance Project on Non-moderated Crowd-sourcing was presented at the ePart conference. Finally, the plane left before 06:00, still night in Kristiansand …